Eight-Year-Old Boy Found Smuggled In Suitcase At Ceuta Border Crossing

An Ivorian man is due to appear in a Spanish court after his eight-year-old son was found in a suitcase at a North African border crossing.

A 19-year-old Moroccan woman was stopped at the Ceuta border crossing when officials noticed she was acting "nervous" and "indecisive". Her suitcase was put through a scanner and the eight-year-old child was found curled up inside.

The woman was detained and the boy's father was picked up at the crossing an hour and a half later with a permit to live in Las Palmas. He is believed to have paid the woman to smuggle his son across the border because he didn't possess the correct documents.

"I just wanted to take him with me to the Canary Islands," the father reportedly said.

"I have been doing this for a long time and I have never seen such a grotesque and dramatic attempt to enter the country by a child," Alfonso Cruzado, a spokesman for the Guardia Civil in Ceuta, told El Mundo newspaper.

"The scanner operators could never imagine that inside the suitcase there was a child."